Britain and Poland-Lithuania

Containing twenty-four essays on a broad and pleasantly eclectic range of economic, religious, cultural and intellectual history topics, this volume brings together papers given by British, Polish, North American, Danish and Australian scholars at a major conference on the histories of Britain and Poland-Lithuania held in Cracow in 2005. As the title ‘Contact and Comparison’ implies, the articles published here seek to do two slightly different things. On the one hand, contributors such as Wendy Childs and Waldemar Kowalski, writing respectively on contacts between Poland-Lithuania and England 1400–1700 and Scots merchants living in early modern Cracow, simply highlight (and quantify) points of mutual contact between these kingdoms. Such an approach throws up interesting historical titbits—the long piked shoes worn in England in the 1360s were called ‘crakows’, while in the 1590s Cracow boasted its own Scottish inn. Most pieces, by contrast, engage in comparative analysis, although the concept, theory or methodology of comparative history are not openly articulated or examined. In 1967, in sketching out his scientific approach to comparative history, William Sewell identified an elephant-trap which might ensnare this kind of enterprise—the difficulty of identifying two suitable geographical units for comparison.1 This is an obvious potential pitfall for this collection: both polities considered here were composite states, variously undergoing territorial expansion or shrinkage between 1300 and 1795. With Poland, Lithuania, Ruthenia, the two Prussias and Livonia on the one hand, and England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and parts of France on the other, these kingdoms and principalities can be paired off for comparison in dozens of different combinations, a kind of analytical hydra

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Danish · Economic history · German · Kingdom · Middle Ages · Scots · Historical and Cultural Studies of Poland · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Historical Studies of British Isles · History